Drawn Into Darkness (12 page)

“M
ake sure you hide all of our tracks,” I told Justin, heading toward the pitiful hut we had found.

“Make sure you watch out for snakes,” Justin retorted.

“Like this one?” Pausing, gently I unwound one end of the oak snake from around my waist and coaxed the other end out of my shorts pocket. As I held her up, she hung between my hands in a catenary curve like an overly thick, gray and white telephone wire.

Justin's jaw sagged. I realized I was showing off and tried to retract.

“You're not afraid of snakes,” I stated, matter-of-fact, lowering my own specimen. “Not the way you took care of that cottonmouth that was looking up my nose.”

He succeeded in moving his mouth, forming speech. “What are you going to do with that?”

“With
her
.” Actually, no way could I tell the snake's gender, so I chose one. “Her name is Hypatia the Wise. If you don't mind, I'll take her inside to chase the mice away.” The oak snake flicked its tongue, then oozed up my arm and into my T-shirt sleeve.

“Where is she going right now?” Justin inquired innocently.

“Ha-ha.” Turning my back to preserve some dignity, I carried Hypatia to the shanty. Or hut. Whatever. Rudimentary and rotting. No problem opening the door; the knob and lock had long since fallen out of it. But I couldn't see a thing inside, it was so dark. I pulled out the flashlight I had toted all the way from the blue pickup truck, clicked it on, and used its rather dim beam to reconnoiter. I saw mouse turds, mostly, and scuttling toward the shadows were some of those huge insects euphemistically called palmetto roaches, a cockroach by another name, still icky all the same. I saw no snakes but did not doubt there might be some underneath the few furnishings. These consisted of a picnic table in the middle of the splintery plank floor and a bunk bed standing against the rickety wall, the mattresses wrapped in thick plastic so the mice wouldn't get into them, I surmised. Hefty Rubbermaid containers stacked in one corner probably served the same purpose, to protect the contents from varmints.

A deer mouse, not to be confused with a dear mouse, scuttled out from under one of the bunk beds and dived into some firewood stacked beside an honest-to-God potbellied stove. I carried Hypatia over there and set her down on the floor, exhorting her, “Enjoy.” An oak snake, after all, is just a fancy-colored rat snake by another name.

Next, with my heart beating a little faster than before, I pried open the Rubbermaid containers.

Acute disappointment. The containers protected blankets and candles, not food.

There were no kitchen cupboards or counter space. No kitchen sink. What did the people who used this place do for water, let alone food?

Ah. I saw a screen door, much patched, leading to the backyard jungle, and toward the near side of the jungle stood an old-fashioned water pump.

I barely noticed the gallon plastic milk jug squatting on the floor inside the screen door. The flashlight battery seemed to be dying just in time for dark. Quickly I scanned the back steps in case of snakes other than Hypatia, then the floor under the picnic table and under the lower bunk—

I shrieked. Justin burst in at a run. “What? What's wrong?”

“What's
right
!” My flashlight had picked up words in thick black marker—
CANNED GOODS
. Plunging to my knees, I laid the flashlight on the floor and began pulling out flat cardboard boxes crowded with cans and jars. “Peanut butter! Do you like peanut butter, Justin?”

“At this point, who cares? Give it here!”

“Wash your hands first.” Oh, how childbearing doth make mothers of us all.

“How? Should I spit on them?”

“Try the pump.”

Then I had to show him how to prime the pump with the water in the plastic milk jug, left there for that purpose. As he scooped peanut butter with a relatively clean finger, the flashlight began to fade so rapidly I turned it off. It was getting dark outside, so I couldn't read the labels on the cans that I was hauling out from under the bunk. Then I remembered the candles I had seen in the Rubbermaid containers, and with them I found, along with a black marker, a dish towel, and some other things, matches.

That simply, like a butterfly fluttering its wings in India, the evening reversed itself and became nearly festive. By the light of candles stuck into the chinks of the picnic table, Justin and I used his handy-dandy multipurpose tool to open cans of Vienna sausage (which I loathed, but he wolfed down like a puppy), stewed tomatoes, baked beans, mixed vegetables, sauerkraut—at this point almost anything edible looked good, and wonder of wonders, I found some Pringles! An acceptable starch on which to load the other things and gulp them down.

While Hypatia traced contented serpentines all over the cabin, Justin and I ate hard and fast. After we had gorged, we belched nearly in unison, laughed, and sat back to look at each other.

“You feel better?” we both asked at the same time, then laughed again.

This was, of course, too good to last. Every movie I had ever seen told me the bad guy should arrive this instant when we were off guard. I said, “We ought to douse the candles.”

I saw a quick shadow of understanding cross Justin's face almost as if I had taken the black marker and written “STOAT” there. He nodded, yet said, “Before we do that, could you cut these Goldilocks cornrows and braids off of me?”

“You don't like them?”

“God, no, I hate them!”

“Stoat the Goat's idea, to draw attention to your hair and not your face, right?”

“Right.” He handed me his pocket tool opened to rudimentary scissors. “He even made me dye my eyebrows.”

“Now, that's extreme.” As quickly as I could, listening all the time for the sound of any vehicle approaching in the night, I started shearing his bleached hair, proceeding at first around the base of his skull. As plaits of hair dropped away from the back of his neck, I saw two marks that wrenched my stomach.

Trying not to sound as sick as I felt, I asked, “What are these, cigarette burns?”

“Stun gun tracks. From when he first knocked my bike down and hauled me into his van.”

Little kid. Stun gun.

“That consummate bastard,” I said.

“Overkill,” Justin agreed. “But effective. I didn't even try to run when he got me home.”

“And
then
what did the son of a bitch do?”

He told me a little bit about it, not too much, and I did not press him with questions. By the time I'd cropped his dreads off, he'd fallen silent. I started on the cornrows, which were more difficult to cut off. After I'd been yanking and tugging for a good time, Justin complained, “Ow.”

“It'll be worse than ow if we don't get our butts to the police station.” I kept hacking, piling shorn yellow hair onto the table. Finished at last, I jammed the grubby green baseball cap onto him. “Wow. You look completely different.” Then, quickly, I blew out the candles and at once felt safer.

Justin's voice spoke to me out of the darkness. “Lee, I don't want to go to any cops.”

Damnation, I'd hoped we'd gotten past his hang-up, whatever it was. “Why aren't you in a lather to get home?”

Silence. I flicked on the flashlight, and in its feeble remaining illumination I saw an answer of sorts in his face. He looked down, then to the side, then turned away from the light.

More gently I asked, “Justin, what are you ashamed of? Nothing's your fault.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Like what?”

“Like you said yourself, I could have called 911, or I could have told a teacher anytime I was in school, and—and now that I'm away from Stoat, I don't know why I didn't! I'm worthless. I—”

“Stop that, Justin. You got drawn into an appalling situation, that's all, and you dealt with it the best you could. You have to remember you're a good guy. You're a hero. You saved my life.”

“But I let my parents down for two years. I'm a coward.”

“No, you're a survivor. Lots of captured people do what you did.”

“Sure they do.”

“No, it's true. In order to go on living, people adapt to brutal situations and accept them as normal.” Belatedly, my brain offered me the name on a platter. “It's called Stockholm syndrome,” I told him as if having a labeled disorder might help him.

I think for a moment it did. He stopped looking at the ground; he looked at me instead. “You serious?”

“Yes. Totally.”

He stared at me for a while before he asked, “So you think my parents will forgive me?”

“Justin, there's nothing to forgive! The whole world will welcome you back.”

“Okay, but everybody will want to know—they'll ask questions—especially the cops.” He sounded panicky. “Lee, I can't face it.”

“Face what?”

“Just for starters, my—where he hurt me, Lee—I'm going to need to see a doctor.”

“Not your fault. Are you scared?”

“Mostly embarrassed.”

“If I got raped and needed a doctor, should I be embarrassed?”

“Lee, that didn't ever really happen, did it?”

Yes, it had. College. Date rape, although I didn't have sense enough to call it that at the time, and I hadn't reported the prick who did it, either. But this mustn't be about me. “It happens to one in every four women,” I said. “Should we be embarrassed?”

“No! That's horrible!”

“Exactly. Horrible is the word. What else did that effing pervert do to you?”

Silence, and I thought I'd lost him, but finally he said very softly, “He—my body hair—he's been making me Nair myself all over. Even, you know, down there.”

Unexpected, that hit me in the gut. I banged the table with my fist. “That total creep!”

“He wanted a little kid. He was going to find one soon. Replace me. You think I'm such a hero, listen to this: I snuck the baseball bat into the van because I was pretty sure that when he went to kill you, he was fixing to kill me too. Like, that letter you wrote, that was a farce. He would never have let me mail it. Which told me I wasn't going to live to mail it.”

“I know,” I said, my voice low.

“You know?” His adolescent voice creaked up an octave.

“I figured. Why would he bring you along to be a witness to murder? He meant to kill you too, and you're smart enough, you knew it.”

“Kind of. I knew yet I kind of didn't know. Am I crazy?”

“Nope. You were just in denial. I've been there myself.” I thought of the five wasted years before the divorce. Georg running around, chasing skirts, looking for his missing
e
. I had thought it was just his midlife crisis. Crapola. I should have dumped him before he dumped me. Way before.

In a very low voice Justin said, “I could have got away once he let me start going to school. Just a phone call. Now I feel like a total coward.”

“Hell, no. It was incredibly brave, what you did, whacking him with that baseball bat to save me. To save
us
.”

“But what if you hadn't come along? What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why I didn't try to escape?”

“Tell them they should just try it once. Try being kidnapped by a psycho. Try being immobilized by a stun gun and raped and beaten and starved and chained to a bed and afraid of dying any minute.”

Silence again. I kept my lips pressed shut to keep from saying any more. Thousands of his self-esteems could have danced on the head of a pin. The decision to contact his parents was one he had to make himself, if at all possible.

Bleakly Justin said, “Nobody's ever going to understand.”

“
I
understand.”

“And that's why I want to stay with you, Lee. Can't I just stay with you? I don't want to go home yet!”

“Stay with me? I don't know where I'm staying myself!”

“Here! What's wrong with right here?”

“How long?”

“Long enough for my hair to grow out.” The flashlight beam was too dim to show me, but I bet he blushed. “The hair on my head, I mean.”

“Justin, we can't risk it. What if Stoat finds us?”

“I just need a few days—”

“Justin, I can't handle a few days.” It was no use; I had to take charge. “We have to get you to the cops. Tomorrow.”

He blurted, “But they're gonna think I'm a faggot.”

“No, they won't think any such thing. They'll understand.”

“Lee, there's no way in hell
anybody
will ever understand what it's been like for me.”

“Nobody ever understands anybody completely. But your parents love you.” I pressed more than I should have. “You can't possibly understand what they've been going through, missing you, searching for you. They love you so much. That's all that matters. Don't you love them, Justin?”

Too late I remembered I was talking to a kid who, in addition to being terribly damaged, was a teenager. But he didn't roll his eyes, just narrowed them, wincing. “Look, can't we just go to sleep now?”

“Oh. Um.” I realized I'd gone too far. “Sure, excellent idea.” Maybe in the morning he'd be more able to deal with his situation.

The dying flashlight helped us grab blankets out of the Rubbermaid containers. We took turns using the very primitive outhouse. Then Justin kicked off his pink socks and headed for the top bunk. “Good night,” I told him.

He didn't answer. Typical kid. I took the flashlight with me to the bottom bunk, turned it off, lay on my side almost in the fetal position, nestled under my blanket, and tried to relax. I was so physically exhausted, this wasn't as impossible as it should have been. Within minutes, Justin and I were both asleep—or so I thought.

•   •   •

“Now, tickle my grits—just look at this.”